Susan Stellin is a writer, researcher and adjunct professor, teaching courses on media ethics, collaborative storytelling and the history of journalism. In 2019, she completed a master's degree in public health at Columbia University, focusing on research methodology, evidence-based policy and health-centered responses to addiction. As a health research and communications consultant, she has worked on projects about ways to reduce overdose deaths, reform punitive drug policies, expand access to treatment for substance use disorders and decrease stigma that can be a barrier to seeking help.

Working with New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, she developed and delivered training to outreach staff at community-based organizations engaging people experiencing homelessness. Previously, she traveled to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut and Michigan to document the work of community-based health and social justice organizations supported by the Overdose Prevention Program at Vital Strategies. Work from that series was exhibited at the Photoville outdoor photography festival in 2021 and is online at LoveDignity.org. In 2019, as part of a team at the Vera Institute of Justice, she worked on the report Changing Course in the Overdose Crisis: Moving from Punishment to Harm Reduction and Health. For that project, she visited a rural county in Ohio to learn how diverse stakeholders are collaborating to reduce overdose deaths and reduce incarceration rates by providing services in the community.

Susan is the co-author of Chancers, a dual memoir written with her husband Graham MacIndoe about his trajectory through addiction, incarceration and recovery—including serving a sentence at Rikers Island and spending five months in immigration detention, where he was held while he was fighting a deportation order. Told in chapters alternating between their points of view, it was published by Random House – Ballantine Books in 2016. Susan and Graham have collaborated on many projects combining interviews and photography, including Coming Clean, a series that was first published in New York magazine and The Guardian and later exhibited at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. They co-curated the exhibition Beyond Addiction: Reframing Recovery, which debuted at the Aronson Galleries in New York City in 2019 and traveled to RIT’s City Art Space in Rochester in 2021, featuring new work by participants in a storytelling workshop they taught.

In 2014, Susan and Graham were awarded a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation for their project American Exile, photos and interviews documenting the stories of immigrants who have been ordered deported from the United States. That project was exhibited at Photoville in New York City in 2015 and at the Head On photo festival in Sydney, Australia in 2016.

As a reporter, Susan has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times for more than 15 years, primarily covering the travel industry, airport and border security, business and technology. She has also written for New York magazine, The Guardian, TheAtlantic.com, The Los Angeles Times, Nieman Reports, Travel + Leisure, Fast Company, Real Simple, Consumer Reports and many other publications. Her first book, How to Travel Practically Anywhere, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2006, featuring advice based on years of reporting about travel for The New York Times. She has been a guest on radio and television programs including All Things Considered, The Leonard Lopate Show, The Diane Rehm Show, On the Media and the BBC and gave a talk about addiction, incarceration and recovery at TEDxStanford 2017.

During the late 1990s, Susan was the CyberTimes Deputy Editor for The New York Times, assigning and editing articles about the internet and the impact of new technology on our lives. Previously, she worked as an editor for CNET in San Francisco, helping develop one of the first websites to publish articles about computers and digital life exclusively online.

Susan earned a B.A. in political science from Stanford University and spent two years after college teaching English and writing in Buenos Aires, Argentina.